Powerful Stuff

December 22, 1985|The Morning Call

To the Editor:

I read in The Call that the government has given preliminary approval to a regulation "allowing the radiation treatment of fresh fruit and vegetables, provided they carry the label that they have been "picowaved."

Again Big Daddy is going to decide what is good for us. If it is so safe, why isn't the term irradiation instead of "picowaved" used?

For the benefit of those who are unaware of what is involved in this "picowaving" (irradiation) of our foods, consider the following. Irradiation is a process by which food is exposed to 100,000 Rads of Cobalt-60 or Cesium-137. The latter is a byproduct of reactor-fission! To give you a better understanding of what we are talking about in this irradiation business, an ordinary X-ray involves only one Rad. So you can see that we are dealing with real powerful stuff - all this to achieve the ultimate in increasing "shelf-life."

To give you a still better idea of what we are in for if this madness is approved, consider the following:

1) Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the Washington-based Public Citizens Group, cites studies by the Russians in which rats were fed gamma-irradiated foods and developed kidney disease and damaged testicles.

2) In several Indian studies, Dr. Wolfe points out that both children and monkeys developed abnormal white blood cells.

3) Even in the U.S. Agriculture Department food safety lab, studies on mice fed irradiated chicken meats, also developed kidney and testicle tumors.

I quote Dr. E.V. McCollum of Johns Hopkins University: "Eat only those foods which will spoil, rot or decay but eat them before they do."

With all our advanced systems of transport and refrigeration, why in heaven's name would our federal government allow this despoilation of our food supply?